Thursday, June 14, 2018

Staunton, June 14 – There are many
ways in which Putin’s Russia is not like Hitler’s Germany, Russian poetess, writer
and commentator Alina Vitukhnovskaya says, including not unimportantly three
that explain reason people in the two countries conformed to the demands of
their rulers (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5B2203FC93B90).

First of all, she says, “in the Third
Reich, the majority of citizens at a certain moment really believed in the
postulates of propaganda, the success of plans for conquest and on the whole
the policy of ‘the party and the government.’ In other words, support for the
Nazi regime by Germany’s citizens was not passive-aggressive as in Putin’s Russia
but immediately active.”

Second, Vitukhnovskaya continues, “quantitively,
the number of active supporters of the National Socialist regime significantly
exceeded the number of such people in the Russian Federation.” And third, Hitler’s
regime before the war was able to offer its citizens at least at an illusory
level far more than Putin can offer his.

“Summing up,” she says, “the tactic
of conformism in the absence of a well-thought-through strategy inevitably
leads to failures both in the short and medium term not to mention that it
makes any long-term plans simply impossible to achieve.”

Vitukhovskaya’s most important
insight here is that many if not all Russians do act in a passive-aggressive
fashion, a kind of behavior in which the individual does not directly oppose
the demands of those in power – indeed, he or she may seek to avoid direct
confrontation lest the regime respond – but acts in a conformist way without
any enthusiasm.

That in turn means that any support
is far thinner and more fragile than many imagine and that a shock to the system
could destroy it far more quickly than anyone now imagines.